Dissertation Research: Metrics of purity: linguistic registers, cultures of waste-reckoning, and the circulation of scientific knowledge in La Paz, Bolivia

本论文的研究提供了一个民族志的循环科学知识的水质和废水排放在拉巴斯，玻利维亚。最近的科学、技术和社会民族志（STS）强调实验室是文化生产的重要场所。然而，他们之所以这样做，是因为他们假定实验室科学是一种权威的机构形式——研究始于实验室，随着科学家和工程师积极扩展其应用领域而不断发展。但是，实验室科学最初是如何成为一种制度形式的呢？在拉巴斯，以实验室为基础的日常和无处不在的科学——一门不洁净的科学——的制度性和权威性是如何建立的？本研究通过对语域的语言人类学分析来补充STS研究，从而解决了这些基本问题。语域是指说话者与社会认可的实践及其实践者联系在一起的同一事物的不同表达方式。在注册表的框架内考察知识的流通，提供了一种方法来模拟人们如何使用口头和文本表征来定位自己与实验室科学的权威和制度的关系，以及这种自我定位是如何改变同样的制度和权威的。拉巴斯是一个语言、种族和人口差异很大的城市，是进行这种研究的场所，因为实验室科学的存在和权威都存在问题。在过去的10年里，拉巴斯的经济改革导致建立了一个竞争激烈的市场，为科学管理的水和废水服务。通过检查说话者对用于计算废物/水的可微分语域现象的使用和意识（可作为涉及测量短语和专门词汇的不同语言库进行正式处理），本研究的目的是描述实验室科学如何被分割（或不被分割）为关于废物/水的流通知识制度的权威中心。国家科学基金会支持在两个研究地点使用人种学和语言学方法收集数据：在拉巴斯的一家私人污水处理公司；在一个土著艾马拉社区。这项研究旨在为关于日益严重的全球废物危机的辩论作出实际贡献，提供一个跨文化的视角，其中包括记录代表性不足的人对地方性废物问题的生活经验。它也将有助于在STS和语言人类学之间建立跨学科的桥梁。

This dissertation research offers an ethnographic account of the circulation of scientific knowledge about water quality and wastewater discharge in La Paz, Bolivia. Recent ethnographies of science, technology, and society (STS) have emphasized the laboratory as an important site of cultural production. They have done so, however, by assuming the pre-existence of laboratory science as an authoritative institutional form -- research begins in the laboratory and follows scientists and engineers as they actively extend its sphere of application. But how does laboratory science come into being as an institutional form in the first place? How is the institutionality and authoritativeness of a laboratory-based science of the everyday and everywhere -- a science of impurity -- established, or not, in La Paz? This research addresses these fundamental questions by supplementing STS studies with a linguistic anthropological analysis of registers (different ways of saying the same thing associated by speakers with socially-recognizable practices and their practitioners). Examining the circulation of knowledge in the framework of registers provides a means for modeling how people use verbal and textual representations to locate themselves in relation to the authority and institutionality of laboratory science, and how this self-positioning is transformative of the very same institutionality and authority. La Paz, a city of linguistic, ethnic, and demographic differences, is the setting for such inquiry, as the very existence and authority of laboratory science is rendered problematic. In the last 10 years, economic reforms in La Paz have led to the creation of a hotly contested market for scientifically managed water and wastewater services. Through an examination of speaker's usage and awareness of differentiable register phenomena used for reckoning waste/water (tractable formally as distinct linguistic repertoires involving measure-phrases and specialized lexemes), the objective of this research is to describe how the laboratory science is carved out (or not) as the authoritative center of a regime of circulating knowledge about waste/water. NSF is supporting data collection using ethnographic and linguistic methods in two research sites: at a private waste/water company in La Paz; and in an indigenous Aymara neighborhood. This research intends to make a practical contribution to debates about the growing worldwide waste-crisis, offering a cross-cultural perspective which includes documentation of an underrepresented people's lived-experience of an endemic waste-problem. It will also contribute to building an interdisciplinary bridge between STS and linguistic anthropology.